Interrogates the Complicity of Psychology in Colonial Violence While Advancing a Fanonian and Freirean Framework That Centres Political Consciousness, Collective Struggle, and Transformative Action

Psychology in the settler-colonial context of Gaza must refuse neutrality and instead align with resistance, liberation, and decolonial praxis. This paper interrogates the complicity of psychology in colonial violence while advancing a Fanonian and Freirean framework that centers political consciousness, collective struggle, and transformative action. Drawing from lived engagements as psychologists embedded in Gaza’s community mental health center, this work exposes how psychological distress is not an individual pathology but a weaponized consequence of occupation, blockade, and systemic erasure. Psychological interventions that ignore the colonial condition only reinforce submission, depoliticization, and adaptation to oppression. Instead, this study insists on a liberatory psychology that cultivates critical awareness, mobilizes resistance, and reclaims mental health as a site of decolonization. Methodologically, this work is grounded in qualitative reflection and decolonial engagement. The authors, working in solidarity from Italy and South Africa, reject the colonial gaze of Western psychological frameworks and instead center the voices, struggles, and resistance strategies of the people of Gaza. Through clinical supervision, training, and research, this praxis-driven inquiry demonstrates how psychology can be mobilized as an insurgent discipline—one that disrupts rather than accommodates colonial domination. Psychological suffering in Gaza is inextricable from structural violence, military aggression, and forced displacement. Western psychological models that pathologize individuals obscure the reality that mental health is a political terrain. This work exposes how mental health professionals can either uphold the status quo or become accomplices in dismantling oppressive systems. The necessity of a radical, engaged psychology emerges as both an ethical imperative and a survival strategy. Implications extend beyond Gaza, calling for a global reckoning with psychology’s role in neocolonial governance. Liberation psychology must be embedded in political struggle, recognizing that healing is not found in adjustment but in collective resistance. This paper challenges mental health professionals to abandon neutrality, weaponize their practice against oppression, and stand in unwavering solidarity with colonized peoples.